Microsoft is also harnessing the power of Office’s 365 services with the Microsoft Graph API and Office add-ins. Developers can create mobile applications that use Microsoft’s Graph API like DocuSign who uses Office 365’s services to improve the delivery of their own documents between customers. Office add-ins are also an opportunity for developers to create features as add-ins are already supported in Office for Windows, Office for Web, Office for iOS on iPad and Office 2016 for Mac.

There are already some extremely useful add-ins like Boomerang which allows workers to schedule and track emails inside of Outlook as well as many other added functionalities on top of Outlook. Also,
Starbucks showed off an add-in that schedules coffee meetings in Outlook, opening the door to companies looking to get in on the add-in action and help drive business inside of Microsoft’s own applications.

Attack of the Microsoft bots

Microsoft also introduced a whole host of new bots that are also powered by Microsoft’s own Azure cloud services. These bots are designed to fulfill a whole host of functionalities and can be used by companies as part of applications to help reduce customer service costs as well as create instantaneous interactions with their customers. These bots are also supposed to be much smarter compared to the bots of yesteryear thanks to Microsoft’s own artificial intelligence and cognitive capabilities with Cortana.

A Westin Hotel bot and Cortana in a Skype chat (Credit: Patrick Moorhead)

The means that Cortana can be used to introduce different companies’ bots to make user interactions smoother and more natural than using a simple webpage. A great example of this is while chatting with someone in Skype, Cortana can infer that you plan on visiting someone and can introduce a hotel bot like Westin’s hotel bot that can help you book a hotel for the appropriate nights and put them into your calendar automatically thanks to the context from Cortana. This marks an improvement in speed of getting things done while also making experiences more interactive and native to the application.

Wrapping up

Microsoft’s BUILD conference this year really did its best to make the case to developers that they should be looking at Microsoft’s many services and applications to develop their own apps. While I consider this a mobile plan B, right now, this is really what Microsoft must do to be relevant in the mobile market regardless of their mobile market share. If developers are building their applications for all operating systems using Microsoft’s tools and incorporating Microsoft’s own services and bots, they ultimately achieve what they appear to be looking for.

To understand the new Microsoft, you must first understand their 3 "ambitions" (Credit: Patrick Moorhead)

Google doesn’t make any money off the billions of devices running the Android operating system, they make money off the services and advertising. Microsoft has the best opportunity for growth with increased mobile relevance and they appear to be doing exactly that by introducing all of these new tools and services. I will be writing more about this over the coming weeks and months, outlining their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of this strategy.